[infinispan-dev] Infinispan documentation

[Tristan Tarrant]

Hi all,

just a heads up on my documentation overhaul plan (incidentally the 
WildFly guys are also currently discussing their own documentation 
issues too on wildfly-dev).

First of all, I've issued a PR [1] which performs an initial overhaul of 
the documentation source files by removing the meaningless "chapter-xx" 
prefix, removing obsolete/duplicated sections, replacing mentions of 
JBoss AS 7 with WildFly and rearranging some sections so that the flow 
is more accurate (i.e. all cachestores as children of persistence, 
simple-cache as a child of local-cache, total-order as a child of 
transactions, etc).

The following are issues / tasks I would like to tackle in the near future:

- Single page vs multiple pages

While having a single page might be useful in some situation (offline?) 
it is cumbersome to navigate and hurts our SEO. Try searching for 
"infinispan transactions" and Google still shows the old wiki page.

- Collapsible Table of Contents

Our current TOC is very large (67 lines) and it is always expanded. This 
means that readers need to scroll to find what they are looking for. I 
think that providing an expandable/collapsible tree would be ideal.

- Merging the guides

By introducing a multi-page approach, the reason to split our different 
guides (getting started, user, server, faq) becomes less of a necessity.

- Versioning

Currently the documentation for each version is available under 
docs/major.minor/. I would like to have semantic names for our main docs 
instead (i.e. "stable" and "dev"). Unfortunately this means that searching

- Alternative formats

Asciidoc makes it easy to produce alternative formats and I think we 
should generate PDF, EPUB and single HTML as well available as separate 
downloads.

I've been playing with the "webhelp" style available in docbook and I 
got [2] (be warned, it's a partial upload) which has many of the 
advantages I'm looking for (and more, like an integrated search), but 
some shortcomings as well. In particular each web page is ~145KB of 
which 132KB of the sidebar, which I guess could be extracted into an iframe.


Comments and suggestions are obviously welcome

Tristan

[1] https://github.com/infinispan/infinispan/pull/4345
[2] http://www.dataforte.net/infinispan/configuring_cache.html
-- 
Tristan Tarrant
Infinispan Lead
JBoss, a division of Red Hat